Validate Your GIS Data Before Your Next Storm

The difference between “routine” and “catastrophe” in next-generation 911 (NG911) could be a single misplaced digit. Your network may be fully functional with up-to-date routing rules, yet unvalidated data could still slip into next-generation core services (NGCS) undetected. 

It’s not always apparent either. In fact, chances are you wouldn’t even discover the bad GIS data until an emergency call is mis-routed. That data could be a road centerline just a few feet off target, or an address from a non-field-verified source. Whatever it may be, a single flawed record could lie dormant for months, hidden until the moment dispatchers most need an accurate accounting.

The National Emergency Number Association’s (NENA) answer was a precise standard, lofty enough that most agencies need more than a year to meet it. A system with bad GIS data is simply not ready for NGCS provisioning. And NENA standards call for road centerlines, address points, and MSAG/ALI match rate of at least 98%. Without automation, the process to reach such a high bar is slow and tedious. Validating one agency’s data against its legacy ALI and MSAG records could take up to 18 months on average! This is because databases typically feature thousands of small errors. And, without automation, you need to find those one by one. If you miss a few or skip a step, you could be looking at death by a thousand cuts (of misaligned GIS data). 

Several federally funded research studies from 2003 to 2017 found that TIGER basemap data (a common fallback for agencies without dedicated GIS resources) averaged a horizontal positional error of 498 feet in urban areas. In rural areas, the error is nearly two miles. For years, agencies could let that error sit and fix their data on their own terms. That grace period is over.

The New Lever Given to 911 Authorities

In July 2024, the FCC adopted its first nationwide NG911 transition rules (FCC 24-78). As of March 2025, any 911 authority in the country can issue what’s called a Phase 2 request. Once issued, it will compel every originating service provider (OSP) in the jurisdiction to validate subscriber location records against the authority’s own GIS data through the Location Validation Function (LVF). Large carriers then have six months to comply, while smaller and rural carriers get a year.

Massachusetts was the first to build the regulatory machinery for this kind of mandate, but it got there by taking a different road. Its regulations define a state Master Address Database (MAD) and Location Database (LDB), and places a standing duty on CSPs to validate their records against the LDB using the LVF (at service-order input and at least quarterly). Records previously validated against an MSAG “must be validated against the LDB using the Location Validation Function,” and that “Validation at the time of the 911 call is not acceptable.” Massachusetts has formally replaced the MSAG and Emergency Service Numbers with the MAD and LDB. What Massachusetts built through years of state rulemaking, the FCC has now made available to every jurisdiction. And all it takes is one authority to pull the lever and begin Phase 2.

Think of Phase 2 as the second half of a matched pair, where Phase 1 is the initial request made to migrate a jurisdiction’s 911 call delivery onto the NG911 core. Phase 2 goes further, reaching into carrier records and demanding they match the authority’s GIS data. To date, INDIGITAL has assisted more than 111 authorities in making successful Phase 1 requests. But the conversation today is different from a year ago. Agencies who made a valid Phase 1 request are now feeling the weight of Phase 2 bearing down on them, and they’re asking whether their data will hold up when they pull the second lever.

Importantly, the federal model has one quirk: the clock doesn’t start until the authority pulls the lever. That sounds like a modicum of flexibility, but it effectively means the bottleneck is whether your own GIS data can survive the scrutiny that a Phase 2 request invites. An authority has to certify that its ESInet connects to functioning NGCS with LVF access before the request is even valid. Data that’s only “assumed accurate” won’t clear that bar.

Take Los Angeles County. LA hosts 88 incorporated cities and more than 120 unincorporated communities. LA County Fire alone receives emergency calls from 59 contract cities. The California Highway Patrol operates the largest PSAP in the state (the third largest in the country) from a single facility near downtown LA. Across the county, 39 separate primary ECCs handle law enforcement dispatch.

Each jurisdiction contributes GIS data to the system, which then must route a call from any location in 4,000 square miles to the correct answering point. That means road centerlines must match address points, and address points must match emergency-service boundaries. Now imagine validating all of that data manually!

Our Answer to Bad GIS Data

We already hold our own network to these standards. INDIGITAL will use VertiGIS 1Engage in our enterprise NGCS system. Internally, 1Engage filters GIS data provided to our NGCS against the same kinds of discrepancies that trip up call routing anywhere else, including schema errors, attribution gaps, topology conflicts, spatial misalignment, and interoperability failures between datasets. Data that meets every rule is automatically provisioned into the NGCS, ready to route calls. The rest goes into a written audit report showing what failed, which rules were broken, and how many records were affected. In other words, nothing slips through undetected.

INGEO by INDIGITAL, our new portfolio of geospatial solutions and services, puts that same 1Engage validation directly in agencies’ hands, rather than keeping it behind the network layer. INGEO’s flagship offering is 1Engage, the very same platform we run in our own NG911 production, built in partnership with 1Spatial by VertiGIS. This solution enables an agency to find and fix those data issues before they submit it to our NGCS, so no data is rejected.  It also lets you convert that same GIS data into the formats needed for CAD and other 911 mapping systems and share it automatically with those providers.

In practice, that means agencies work through more than 300 NG911-specific validation rules (as opposed to basic schema checks), using MSAG and ALI cross-validation to catch discrepancies that affect location accuracy, and advanced spatial analysis to surface road and boundary issues. A tabular review would miss that entirely. 

If needed, agencies can even use 1Engage to aggregate GIS data from multiple contributors, jurisdictions, and source systems into one authoritative dataset without requiring every contributor to use the same technology or workflow. And because the validation rules are centrally managed, they evolve alongside NENA i3 standards. So what passes today still passes when the standards change.

Once data clears those checks, 1Engage provisions it into NGCS environments and, through INDIGITAL’s CentralSquare partnership, into CAD systems as well. The agency maintains ownership and access to its data throughout the process. So there’s no waiting on a third party to retrieve or manage it.

The Bottom Line on GIS Data

As our CEO, Lynne Houserman, put it when we launched the portfolio: “In NG911, the network and the data cannot be treated as separate conversations.” Andy Berry, CEO of VertiGIS, framed the partnership similarly, describing it as a single accountable path from validated GIS data through to a fully operational NG911 environment. That’s why 1Engage is the offering we’re leading with. Every authority moving toward NG911 is dealing with two systems at once – the network that routes the call and the geospatial data that tells the network where the call must go. Validating them together, under one accountable team, is the reason we created INGEO.

For carriers and 911 authorities watching Massachusetts and wondering how much runway their own state is giving them, the honest answer is probably “less time than you think.” The authorities who were first to file had data ready for scrutiny. Everyone filing after them faces regulators who now know exactly what to check for.

Waiting for a misrouted call to reveal a gap in the data is an expensive way to find one. Talk to our team about what a 1Engage readiness check of your own GIS data would find first.

9-1-1 Is Our Calling™